Upcoming conference
The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450-1800. Contested Ideals, Controversial Spaces, and Suspicious Objects. In: H-Soz-Kult, 21.02.2021, . The conference runs from August 26-28, 2021.…
Eating Nasty Things (reposted)
[This is a reposting of a post from 2014 that seems to have spirited itself away. Fortunately I had a copy of the content tucked safely away...] This post is inspired partly by a paper written in 1976, but which I have only just come across (Frank Paul Bowman, “Suffering,Madness and Literary Creation in Seventeenth-Century…
Sadomasochism and Christianity
This is a post on a website entitled "Bad News about Christianity". The name gives a fairly good indication of what it's all about, and there's certainly a lot of detailed information on the website, but unfortunately there is no indication of the identity of the author[s]. This seems to be intentional. Anyway, the post…
The hurt(ful) body
The hurt(ful) body Performing and beholding pain, 1600–1800 Edited by Dr Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven and Karel Vanhaesebrouck Manchester University Press, July 2017 I know! It has been too long - far too long - since I updated this blog! Nothing could illustrate that more clearly than the fact that this book came…
All those buttons – enough to make you want to end it all!
'All this buttoning and unbuttoning' (anonymous suicide note, 18th century)(Oh, and Merry Christmas)— Early Modern Death (@EarlyModDeath) December 23, 2016…
Death in Medieval Europe
Death in Medieval Europe I haven't been keeping up with posts over the last few months - too many other things going on! I'll try to remedy that and catch up on interesting developments in the field (suppose I should make that my New Year's resolution!). Anyway, here's a new publication that may be of…
“Jesus wept: and no wonder by Christ!”
"Jesus wept" - the shortest verse in the Bible (John 11:35) and the subject of a short piece on by Thomas Dixon on Umberto Eco and John Donne in the History of Emotions blog. The post makes the point that "Donne is one of a very few sermon writers to discuss Christ’s tears", though I…
Masochism and Anachronism
What does it mean to talk of "masochism" prior to the publication, in 1870, of Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz [Venus in furs], or of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's adoption of Masoch's name to describe the condition of deriving pleasure from pain in Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie [Sexual psychopathy: a clinical / forensic study]…
John Gray on the decline of violence
John Gray argues in The Guardian that Pinker's got his sums all wrong and there has been no decline in violence.…
The Civilizing Process and the Decline of Violence
THE DEBATE over whether humanity is becoming less violent has its beginnings in Ted Robert Gurr's 1982 article "Historical trends in violent crime : a critical review of the evidence" (in Tonry and Morris, eds, Crime and Justice : an Annual Review of Research). Several other studies, mainly based on homicide data from Scandinavia and…